Paid advertising through Google AdWords or other pay-per-click services can be a great way to bring well-targeted traffic to your site, but it’s important to remember the other half of search results. After all, organic (unpaid) search results won’t chip away at your margins.

So to get a little “free” advertising, why not spend a little time optimizing your product pages for search engines? Chances are, your ecommerce software isn’t doing it for you. Here are six things you can do to get started:

1 - Research keywords for your products

Each time you add a product to your store, you should take a few extra minutes to optimize the description and page title for search. But don’t choose your keywords at random! It’s important to find out what words that people are actually using when product-hunting online.

Tools like Wordtracker, Yahoo!’s keyword suggestions and Google’s AdWords keyword tool will show you what terms are being searched for. You might find some frequently-searched terms that have little competition. These niche keywords can be a real sweet spot!

2 - Identify products in page headings

Many ecommerce solutions don’t properly code page headings in HTML. Page headings are supposed to be represented by the HTML tag <h1>. However, many ecommerce systems will improperly code it as a paragraph or table. While they might look the same either way, only the <h1> is properly understood by search engines. If you’re not using these tags, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to set the keywords for your page.

3 - Put product names in titles, too

The same rule applies to your page titles, too. Some ecommerce solutions will simply use the title of your site on every page, but this isn’t the best solution. It’s better to include the product, category or page name along with your site’s name - since search engines will use this to determine what the page is about.

For example, let’s say we’re selling a shower radio. The titles <title>Acme Electronics: Shower Radio</title> or <title>Shower Radio - Acme Electronics</title> are both good choices. A note: while both versions will be measured equally by search engines, the second one, which lists the product name first, may generate more clicks as the last portion may get cut off on a results page.

Paul Bradish shows us how important titles can be. He brought his blog’s search ranking up significantly in Google’s results with just minor changes to his <title> tag.

4 - Label your links

Search engines will also use the links pointing to a page to determine what a page is about. This is especially true for Google. The general philosophy behind this is that any web page will naturally try to promote itself. As a result, it’s more likely that other pages and sites will give an honest assessment of a page.

This rule is first applied to links from other sites. When you acquire an inbound link from a directory, product review or any other website, it’s best if the clickable text of that link includes keywords relevant to the page that’s being linked to.

But this rule also applies to your internal navigation. So, in the same way that you include a product’s name in the heading and title of its own page, you want to include it within the clickable text of any links pointing to it. A link to our example page that says “shower radio” in the link text is much more valuable than one that says “click here” or “learn more”.

5 - Use search-friendly URLs

Most ecommerce systems use variables in the URL or address to define product pages. (You can see this when URLs ends with an ugly string of numbers and letters: page.php?category=42&productid=3827). Search engines are usually capable of listing these pages, and not much consideration is given to the URL itself. But, as mentioned in the previous step, search engines give weight to links from other pages, and often people will use the URL of your page to link to you.

Because of this, it’s better to use a URL that includes product names or words. www.example.com/category/product-name/ is a good format to use.

Some eCommerce solutions require manual changes in order to do this. Others can be modified automatically with plug-ins — I found some for Miva, osCommerce and X-Cart. Of course, some solutions, like Elastic Path, include this feature out-of-the-box.

If you already have pages that rank well, you might want to skip this step. To search engines, changing URLs is like erasing and re-creating a new page. Your rankings may not be preserved.

6 - Don’t miss the point!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great way to bring in targeted visitors, but your site still needs to convert. Some site owners cover their pages with links and repeated keywords in an attempt to boost search engine rankings. Not only will these techniques fail, they’ll make your site less usable for your visitors.

Your main goal of your site should be to educate visitors about your products and persuade them to become customers. SEO efforts need to work in harmony with your site. Never sacrifice quality content for it.

Keep search in mind

SEO can be complicated, but as long as you keep these rules in mind when you’re setting up your product pages, you should see some improvements in your search traffic. But remember, these are just a few of the many techniques that you can use to improve your site’s rankings in search engines. If you’re interested in some further reading, Chris Beasley of WebsitePublisher.net recently published an excellent SEO guide that’s invaluable to any site owner.

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